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Should citations be weighted to assess the influence of an academic article?

Author

Listed:
  • Damien Besancenot

    (Université Paris Descartes)

  • Abdelghani Maddi

    (Observatoire des Sciences et Techniques, HCERES and University Paris 13)

Abstract
Citations are by nature heterogeneous. A citation worth may dramatically vary according to the influence of the citing article or to the journal's reputation from which it is issued. Therefore, while assessing the influence of an academic article, how should we weight citations to take into account their real influence? In order to answer this question, this article suggests various methods of weighting citations in the building of articles quality indicators. These indexes are then used to measure the influence of the articles published in the top five economic journals over the 2000-2010 period and analyses the sensibility of these indicators to the choice of the weighting schemes. Our main result is that whatever the weighting scheme, information carried by the different indicators is not significantly different. From Occam's razor principle, the number of citations provides an efficient and sufficient tool to measure research quality.

Suggested Citation

  • Damien Besancenot & Abdelghani Maddi, 2019. "Should citations be weighted to assess the influence of an academic article?," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 435(1), pages 435-445.
    • Handle: RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-19-00049
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    File URL: http://www.accessecon.com/Pubs/EB/2019/Volume39/EB-19-V39-I1-P44.pdf
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Keywords : Citations; Articles' ranking; weighting functions; Pagerank; Eigenfactor.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • A2 - General Economics and Teaching - - Economic Education and Teaching of Economics
    • O3 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights

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